Author: dbaileyatma

Such an awesome force for the Indie Writer and artist movement. We discuss horror, poetry, and the creation of communities for the “gamification” of writing and self promotion! Follow her now…NOW…send her money.

Anyone who reads this blog for my occasional stance on education policy will know my avid opposition to rising standardized testing and increasing rigors we place upon our children. I find it shocking how recess in my local schools continues to be whittled down more and more for a curriculum whose primary focus is “training” my child solely for tasks to prepare them for rote memorization. Pile on homework, constant evaluation, and a mix of socially stunted kids with no outlet to express their individualism and what you have is a pressure cooker of mental illness that gets more and more intense with each year.

This system is inflicting both intellectual and emotional harm to our students. It is time for our society to discuss the rights of children to develop in more natural, nurturing ways, and one of the best models for this potential shift can be found in the language of the growing LGBTQ advocacy.

I have been very attentive to the developing arguments centering around increasing the rights and empathy for LGBTQ individuals and have noticed a potential connection between our shifting social climate and the way we institutionalize our children. The environment of someone identifying as LGBTQ has profound effects on their health depending upon whether they live in a supportive or oppressive location. For those who must hide their true nature, the health effects and increasing rates of suicide are shocking. It is truly a devastating mental health hazard to imprison one’s true self in shadow for fear of persecution.

Consider for a moment the rate of depression, obesity and mental illness that plagues our country. A great deal of that malaise may be directly related to the oppressive nature of education. We rob children of freedom. We snatch away the concept of play and replace it with grinding gears and grades that constantly question their self worth. We compartmentalize them, separate them according to age group, and demand a homogenous learning process that makes almost no allowance for individual learning processes or styles.

Is it any wonder we are miserable and medicating ourselves with junk food and antidepressants? Is it any wonder that our teens anguish and melt away as their creativity and divergent thinking wither to nothing?

We are killing our children. We are killing them not just in the physical, stopped heart, suicide kind of way. We are killing the very person that they are. We are exterminating the individual they could become. All of this plays out in service not in an attempt to develop a better self, but to train the child as a better product for the job they will one day be damned to perform.